Writer and readers
Some things are just hard to value. Take writers, for instance. As a group, they aren’t the most respected or highest-paid professionals, and even in Hollywood, where scribes can make a living wage, writers tend to get swapped around like Legos.
But take them out of the entertainment industry, even for a few weeks, and the 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America can cost the economy billions of dollars. The WGA went on strike this week in an effort to force the studios to get real about DVD and Web royalties (their motto: “When you get paid, we get paid”), and late-night chat shows immediately went into reruns. No writers means no topical jokes. Next on the list: Soap operas, which will soon run out of scripts.
When the WGA last went on strike in 1988, shock waves battered the industry for months. Some estimates put the cost at roughly $500 million, but others figure the industry’s losses may have exceeded $1 billion in Los Angeles alone. This one could prove even trickier: How do you put a value on a potentially lucrative distribution method that hasn’t really started paying off yet? Stay tuned...
THIS WEEK’S WORDS: Add, America, chat,contract, David, death, dollars, DVD, entertainment, error, failed, fees, gave, get, Guild, Hollywood, huge, hurts, Jay, joke, L.A., late, Leno, Letterman, lost, love, mashup, members, money, mood, more, New, night, operas, out, paid, picket, react, reruns, resolve, road, run, screen, set, shows, signs, skit, SNL, soap, strike, studios, test, thousand, TV, twelve, up, vote, Web, win, work, Writers, York.
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